The problem with your AI therapist; Financial Times, October 10, 2026

Jemima Kelly, Financial Times; The problem with your AI therapist

[Kip Currier: Thought-provoking piece in the Financial Times about the differences between mental health therapy with a human therapist and purported mental health therapy with AI chatbots. Some questions that come to mind for me:

• What are the ethical issues of AI chatbot therapy?
• When can and should AI chatbot therapy be considered "unauthorized practice of medicine"?
• What are the benefits of licensing mental health professionals in comparison to unlicensed and unregulated AI chatbot therapy models?
• What are the impacts of AI chatbot therapy on minors and what oversight roles should adults assume?
• What training data has been used (and not used) in training AI chatbot models that purport to perform mental health therapy?
• What oversight should there be of AI chatbot therapists and by whom?
• Who is responsible for harms caused by AI chatbot therapists and what should the consequences be for such harms?
• What are the ethical responsibilities of licensed healthcare professionals to weigh in on and shape policy, ethical, and statutory decisions on these kinds of issues?]

"To be fair to the chatbot (as one should always be), I definitely felt better and more level-headed after our conversation. But as I thought more about it, I realised that what had helped me was not so much the AI-generated psychobabble, but having a friend there to speak to me, with all her kindness, uncertainty and imperfection.

What bothered me was how attached my friend seemed to certain specific terms during our conversation, repeatedly deferring to them as some kind of authoritative backup for what she was saying. Because they had come from a machine and not a human being, they were delivered with none of the nuance or hesitancy that a real-life therapist might have spoken with and were therefore somehow being treated as the whole truth...

When I went back to my friend to ask her whether she was still finding her chatbot therapist as helpful as before, I was quite struck by her response. Increasingly, she told me, her experience is that it’s “like eating cardboard covered in chocolate — it seems good but then I wake up after three hours and realise I’m not actually that well nourished”."